A recent DailyTech poll of IT
professionals indicates that more than a third have already
implemented virtualization technology broadly in their organizations,
but their attitudes toward cloud computing ranged from uncertainty to
downright skepticism.

Among the 2,878 DailyTech
readers who took part in the poll, 36 percent indicated that they
“already have virtualization technology in place,” compared to
only 12 percent that said they had no plans to virtualize. However,
this 3-to-1 ration in favor of virtualization did not extend to cloud
computing an advanced form of virtualization in which the physical
location of data and computing resources typically resides outside
the corporate campus, often with a third-part service provider at a
remote location.

“We've virtualized a large percentage
of our applications in the name of efficiency,” according to a
comment posted by DailyTech reader nafhan,
who works in the financial services field. However, “Having that
information out `in the cloud’ would at best provide an interesting
set of regulatory and compliance issues to deal with. It would be a
lot more trouble than it's worth.”

“Cloud won't be ready for primetime
for at least another 3 to 5 years,” wrote DailyTech reader
Spivonious.
“Virtualization is here now. We've moved all but our large servers
onto a VMWare server. We are currently in the first phase of pushing
out thin clients that will connect to a virtual desktop.”

Security and performance were the top
objections to cloud computing, according to DailyTech poll
respondents.

“Cloud computing is the vaporware
of the quarter...seems like they can't figure out anything better to
do to use those idle cycles on multi-core CPUs,” reader
EricMartello
wrote. “Does any self-respecting business really want to entrust
proprietary assets to a 3rd party who may not even be on the same
continent? “

Martello expressed no such qualms about
utilizing virtual machine technology in the enterprise.
“Virtualization, on the other hand, is a great idea because it is
making efficient use of idling CPUs,” he wrote. “Hey, no time
like the present to cut some costs. Look at it this way, the money
you save your company with a solid virtual machine setup may mean
your semi-useless ass doesn't get laid off for another few months. :D
“

At least one reader was prepared to
defend cloud computing from a security standpoint. In fact, placing
sensitive data assets in the cloud could prevent some of the most
frequent and catastrophic security breaches that occur in
organizations with a large and mobile workforce, according to a post
from MrPoletski.

“Because your data is in a cloud,
which resides on a top secure server at your company, you don't have
to worry about the office dork leaving his laptop in the pub or
something -- because whoever gets it won't be able to do anything or
steal any data because they need to log into the cloud first. The
actual unit doesn't contain anything useful at all,” Poletski
wrote. “No more `so and so loses 15 million customers’ info' or
anything like that, because the data is not physically there to lose.
The best form of data security is to not have the data to loose in
the first place!”

Poletski’s post drew criticism from
fellow reader SunAngel.
“With cloud, you’re just begging for attention to your network.
Yes, they don't necessarily have to be VPN connections, but the more
entry points to your network, the more opportunities for a
catastrophe to happen. Ask any IT manager that’s been hit, he'll
tell cloud blows chunks.”

Along with security concerns, several
readers expressed fears that cloud computing places an undue strain
on wide-area network (WAN) connections, leading to degraded
application performance.

“Bandwidth is greater on the LAN that
it is from any Cloud. We serve as many apps as possible from local
disk, servers, and the cloud if necessary -- and in that order,”
wrote 9nails.
“Within our LAN campus we have Gigabit links, but our WAN link
connections (shared with the Internet connection) are a minuscule
fraction of that. We try to reduce the amount of data that needs to
travel over these links as much as possible. And that is especially
true since business use alone does a fairly good job in consuming a
lot of bandwidth.“

“As much as I like
tech, I don't see how many companies can justify things like thin
clients and cloud computing,” reader DOOA
wrote. “We tried both these technologies. Losing 10 percent speed
in Word, Excel and our database was supposedly made up with reduced
hardware costs. Fortunately our leaders take a more intelligent view
and see that end user productivity is the whole reason we have an IT
department.”

Placing resources in
the cloud is not only cause of reduced application performance, noted
at least one reader, claiming that virtualization itself is to blame
in some cases.

“Virtualization is
not the free lunch it's made out to be,” according to reader
Motoman.
“A major software vendor I worked for for many years sold lots of
different products. Most of these we certified and supported on
VMWare. A couple of them, we did not...the reason being that running
them in a VM environment sucked anywhere from 25% to 90% of their
throughput away...a function of their processing profile (these apps
in particular used massive disk I/O, RAM I/O, and CPU utilization all
at the same time...which seemed to be instant death in a VM
environment).

“Customers would ask, `When are you going to
certify these products on VM?’ To which we'd have to explain that
we really couldn't because of the problem noted above. Indignant IT
guys would just get pissy at that point and either dismiss us, or
tell us we didn't know what we were doing, or whatever. Then they'd
go and try to implement on VM, and guess what? They got 10 or 20
percent of the throughput they expected,” Motoman wrote in his
post.

“I'm not sure
about cloud computing, but the technology for virtualization is
definitely ready for prime time,” wrote reader Robear.
“It's merely a matter of adoption and IT management policies at
this point. There are simply too many advantages to virtualization
that you cannot ignore; mainly the TCO. Every executive can speak in
$$$, IT or not.

“I can tell you we're looking into desktop
virtualization for our software engineers,” he added.
“Virtualization is GREAT for setting up integration environments
and the likes.”

Reader Doby
concurred. “End of the day, taking into account most consideration
from manageability, utilization, costs; virtualization is almost
always the way to go, though there are some situations that it might
not make sense for, they are very few.“

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